Wendy and Lucy

Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to critical fave, Old Joy, yields a sad and modest, but beautifully modulated film in the vein of indie neorealism. It plays like an American Umberto D., but instead of a destitute old man and his dog, it tells of a destitute young woman and her dog. Wendy is marvelously inhabited by Michelle Williams, as a waif-like drifter on her way to Alaska, always on the edge of tears but rarely succumbing. She is not headed “Into the Wild” but hoping to get a job at a cannery in Ketchikan. Her car breaks down in a small town in Oregon, and her life proceeds to break down around her. When she desperately tries to shoplift some dogfood for Lucy, played by Reichardt’s own “yellow-gold” mutt, she is collared by an eager-beaver clerk and sent to be booked and fingerprinted. And when she finally posts bail from her rapidly dwindling stake of cash and returns to where Lucy had been tied up, the dog is no longer there. The rest of the brief but deliberately-paced eighty minutes is taken up with Wendy’s increasingly desperate attempts to find Lucy. Without histrionics, an abject story of poverty and loneliness unfolds, with some tender and touching moments but just the slightest glimmer of hope in its denouement. (2008, Images, n.) *7-* (MC-80.)